The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum by Heinrich Boll (1974)

Heinrich Boll's 1974 novella "The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum" can be read as an easy indictment of the press's propensity to choose sides, sway public opinion and even ruin lives. The book recounts how a young woman and those near to her lose control of their lives when she confesses to the shooting of a journalist whose aggressive investigation destabilizes her.

Other less obvious readings are also possible. In fact the first chapter, which is only one page long (in a short book made up of 58 chapters) sets the stage for multiple conversations, one of which takes the novel out of its manifestly political and sociological context to explore questions of form and narration. These investigations ultimately lead to epistemological considerations: what can we as readers actually know? what is the truth? how do we get at it?

The novel begins with the narrator (journalist? friend? neighbour? concerned citizen? novelist? — we never find out) naming his sources, which include the transcripts of the police investigation and the names of the defense attorney and the public prosecutor. Then, before the third sentence ends, the conceit of impartiality breaks down because he reveals that his “account” is “supplemented” with unofficial and ultimately subjective material acquired from the public prosecutor who is a childhood friend of the defense attorney, a man who is, bizarrely enough, implicated in the life of his client, the accused. The narrator himself admits that “the case of Katharina Blum will...remain more or less fictitious”.

In this novella, police station truth will vie with courtroom truth which will vie with opinion coloured by loyalty, mixed with the claim that truth is not transparent and if it is at all available, it is available through the creative act. Truth is not singular or self evident and Boll tells us elsewhere that it “must be assembled” through language which is “inexact”. He writes,“The fact that a word has a multiplicity of meaning, not only within a language but also outside of it, makes it important to try to get to the root of words and language. That is the constant striving of literature. The absolute meaning exists somewhere; we just haven't found it yet.”

The telling of Katharina Blum’s story is a successful experiment in modern, committed, philosophically driven literature.

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Lucio Fontana

The same artist who carved, painted and fired small ceramic figures borrowed from medieval European folkloric tradition also slashed his modern, abstract canvases.

Argentinian-born, Italian artist Lucio Fontana lived through the first half of the twentieth century and responded to the cultural currents of his time. Modernism, Futurism, Catholicism, the recuperation of archaic art materials and the development of installation art were the movements (some of which veered to the left, others to the right) that informed his practice. Fontana even added his own manifesto to an era that was rich in new ideas. He called himself and his followers Spatialists, people who sought to transcend the restrictions of traditional genres in order to create art that could synthesize colour, movement, sound and space.

In the case of Fontana's small clay sculptures (made at the same time that he began experimenting with rough perforations and smooth cuts to his canvases) the subject matter was traditional — he crafted harlequins, warriors, battles and Christ-figures on the Cross. And yet, the odd colours, the shiny glaze, the active or emotive stance of the characters proclaimed a new way of seeing. In Fontana's hands, a Harlequin (a comic servant from Renaissance Italian musical theatre) could be made of traditional clay, be glazed like an Etruscan pot, declaim like a Baroque statue and exaggerate the rough texture of some of Rodin's and Giacometti's work.  

Fontana's perforated and slashed paintings, despite their apparent simplicity, also subvert established ideas. These paintings become three dimensional, not through trompe l'oeil or perspectival lines but through the effect of the light behind the canvas coming through the tear, giving physical depth and a changing vista to the viewer — the eye receives differing impressions as it moves from one end of the canvas to the other.

The simultaneously brittle and flowing look of the small sculptures and the shimmering optical effect of these paintings cannot be reproduced by photography. Lucio Fontana's work is interactive and only a trip to a museum will do.

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Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain, 1876

In the history of literature, some books have complex lives, falling in and out of favour with critics, readers, school boards and even courts of law. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, unlike its sibling The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, has had a relatively smooth ride for most of its 140 year life. Of course, the presence of the despicable Injun Jo
e and the occasional use of sensitive racial tags has led to debates about the appropriateness of teaching Tom Sawyer, unexpurgated, in secondary schools, but in large part the book remains on reading lists and library shelves.

One way to test the appeal of a book that is being read today, whether it was written generations ago or is newly published, is to read the book reviews. In the case of Tom Sawyer the verdict of the initial reviewers was largely the same, summed up by The London Examiner in 1876 as such: "the book will no doubt be a favourite with boys … (but) it might be most prized by philosophers and poets". Essentially, there is something there for everyone.

The opinion of both American and British reviewers was positive, with the exception of a couple, one of whom conflated the purpose of literature and a preacher's homily: "One gets very fond of Tom notwithstanding his grave faults, some of which you almost wish had been omitted. One cannot help regretting that so fine a fellow as Tom lies and smokes...".

The review which best summed up the contribution that Mark Twain made to American letters and to the psychological and sociological understanding of his country came from W. D. Howells who wrote in The Atlantic Monthly in May 1876, "The whole little town lives in the reader's sense with its religiousness, its lawlessness, its droll social distinctions, its civilization qualified by its slave-holding, and its traditions of the Wilder West which has passed away." The whole review is worth reading because the opinions stated and the quality of the analysis are as valid today as they were when Howells published the piece.

Now, we might want to add that race and class are the determining categories through which we view the institution of slavery, puritan-based religion, rural and small-town prejudices. Similar ideas, slightly different language.

Regarding the style, both Twain’s contemporaries and readers today would say that Mark Twain’s wit, timing and good writing breathe life into the complex humanity of pre-civil war America. Quite a feat for the father of a fictional twelve year old orphan who just wanted to play hooky and search for pirate gold!

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Grimms' Fairy Tales by David Hockney, 1969

In 1993 the South Bank Centre in London mounted a touring exhibition of David Hockney's lithographs which he created in 1969 to illustrate six fairy tales by the Grimm brothers. The booklet which accompanied the exhibition is small, short (31 pages) and cleverly executed and includes just enough information and reproductions to pique the interest of those who favour new interpretations of old works.

The middle part of the booklet is especially good, consisting of notes made by Hockney to explain the rationale as well as the sources for the various lithographs.

It is clear from the start that he takes liberties with the narratives, adding psychological dimensions to some of the stories that would have seemed bizarre to the Grimm brothers and their audience but which ring true to us.

Hockney also tells us which artists or paintings served as models for some of the images, citing among others, Hieronymus Bosch, Leonardo da Vinci, Vittore Carpaccio and Rene Magritte. In the lithograph entitled "The Enchantress with the baby Rapunzel", for instance, the figures are positioned in the classical Renaissance manner of religious paintings. Hockney explains, "so the only way she (the ugly Enchantress) could get a child would be to get it from somebody else, so I thought she was probably a virgin, an old virgin. So this is based on a Virgin and Child motif, and it's done from a Hieronymus Bosch. But of course the face is altered and made deliberately ugly, and the trees are done from Leonardo da Vinci."

Revelations of inspirations abound. There's a lithograph from the tale "The Boy who Left Home to Learn Fear" showing a sexton disguised as a ghost trying to frighten a boy where the sheeted man was "drawn from simply sticking a handkerchief on top of a pencil and watching the folds, so I could draw the correct shadow on the folds". The proportions of the man are wrong — but knowing the source for the image changes the viewer's reaction to the composition. We go from confusion to amusement.

Hockney mines popular culture too — the front and back cover illustrations are taken from old horror movie stills and the inside back cover consists of a four-part panel series showing somewhat grotesque yet comical (and comic book style) images of Rumpelstilzchen tearing himself into pieces, ending with eyes, hair and nose flying around, above a dismembered belly and limbs.

This reimagining of fairy tales is complex and original and having the artist discuss process makes these decidedly odd lithographs memorable.

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Paul Auster, Winter Journal, 2012

If Paul Auster had read reviews of his book Winter Journal, he might have been disappointed with a number of them, several of which called this effort an essentially prosaic, episodic, arc-less piece of writing. I think they didn't get the point.

It is true that this book lacks the classic linear temporal structure that autobiographies commonly follow, but this is Paul Auster writing. One critic whose review departs from the expectation of a diachronic trajectory suggests that the book is "a literary composition — similar to music — composed of autobiographical fragments". That's getting closer.

Auster himself tells us that he will "try to examine what it felt like to live inside this body from the first day that you can remember being alive until this one. A catalogue of sensory data. What one might call a phenomenology of breathing."

A "phenomenology of breathing" — a way to collect and structure experience and consciousness via breath, that is, through the senses, the body. Yes, that's what Auster does: he writes his life, told in fragments, episodes, through lists of things like childhood games played, places travelled to, scars left behind from youthful mishaps, addresses lived at over a lifetime.

The unconnectedness, the varied lengths of the recollections, the poetic texture of the book also informs the rhythm of the reading: sometimes we slow down to think about something that's being recounted, prompting us, too, to remember and list our own childhood candies (feeling again their stickiness on our hands). Sometimes we speed up to find out what that terrible car accident did to himself and his family.

Winter Journal is in turn jubilant and melancholy, deep and light, and always carefully and beautifully written.

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Gibran in Paris, Yusuf Huwayyik, 1976

Introductions or prefaces to works of fiction or autobiography are generally explanatory and laudatory so whenever I encounter one which is argumentative or contestatory, I take notice. In the case of Yusuf Huwayyik's memoir "Gibran in Paris", a book which I enjoyed and would recommend, I was somewhat taken aback by the introductory essay's forthright assessment not of the work itself but of the psychologies and philosophies that lay outside the scope of the book...

The twenty five short stories, more accurately characterized as episodes or character studies are perfect. They were written in 1957 when Lebanese painter Yusuf Huwayyik  was 74 years old, describing two short but fruitful years (1909-10) in his youth, spent in Paris studying art with Kahlil Gibran — painter, poet, mystic and author of "The Prophet". The stories are written by a mature, older man who has reflected on life and given us a balanced, discrete (oh so charmingly discrete) account of the adventures of two young men of limited financial means but great ambition who sowed their wild oats in Picasso and Isadora Duncan's Paris.

In the introductory essay, a fifth of the entire book, its author Matti Moosa —  academic, critic and translator of Huwayyik's reminiscences, makes almost no reference to the stories. Instead, he maps out a sophisticated philosophical and sociological schematic of Gibran's life and work, missing no opportunity to point out inconsistencies and gaps in his thought. Gibran is a Modernist, a Catholic, a Romantic, a student of Nietzsche, a self-appointed guru, a conflicted Easterner and a conflicted Westerner - an unlikely mix, clearly. Moosa also shows how Gibran sometimes just gets it wrong, misreading history or philosophy, "vitiated as his understanding is by a somewhat spurious naivete", especially when voicing his opinions on the position of women in his native culture or his interpretation of Nietzsche. There is nothing of the hagiography here!

After the toughness of the introduction, how can the reader move on to enjoy the generous, whimsical quality of the stories?

And yet there is much to recommend this little book which I would argue is really two separate pieces of writing: twenty five charming stories about the lives of two young men in Paris and a university-style essay best suited to an academic journal. They don't go together and yet they're both worth reading.

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Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell, 1933

Over the years, travelling by train to Paris and London, I've seen dozens of readers tucking into George Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London". It's just short enough to be able to finish if read uninterrupted on a round trip journey from one capital to another. And, because it's based on real places (which are easy enough to locate), you're motivated to read quickly so that if you pass through any of the areas described you can do some amateur forensic sleuthing, if you like.

This book is neither straight journalism nor high literature but a combination of the two. Journalism's mandate is to tell, as clearly as possible, what happened, how, where, to whom and if possible, why. Style serves content. Literature is free to examine an event or a situation, to get at the truth too, but the rules regarding form and content are completely different. "Down and Out" does both brilliantly.

Orwell himself admitted that while the events and people he described were real enough, he took liberties with the facts by rearranging the sequence of events, sanitizing the dialogue and changing or omitting names of people or places. In this way, publishers, censors and young Orwell's fellow 'plongeurs'' concerns could be satisfied. This document - memoir viewed through socialist sensibilities, wrapped up in fine description is a classic in that strange genre of writing that others like Hemingway also excelled at.

Read the opening scene - it will hook you:

"The rue du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning. A succession of furious, choking yells from the street. Madame Monce, who kept the little hotel opposite mine, had come out on to the pavement to address a lodger on the third floor. Her bare feet were stuck into sabots and her grey hair was streaming down. 

MADAME MONCE: 'Salope! Salope! How many times have I told you to not squash bugs on the wallpaper? Do you think you've bought the hotel, eh? Why can't you throw them out the window like everyone else? Putain! Salope!' 

THE WOMAN ON THE THIRD FLOOR: 'Vache!' 

Thereupon a whole variegated chorus of yells, as windows were flung open on every side and half the street joined in the quarrel. They shut up abruptly ten minutes later, when a squadron of calvary rode past and people stopped shouting to look at them. 

I sketch this scene just to convey something of the spirit of the rue du Coq d'Or. Not that quarrels were the only thing that happened there - but still, we seldom got through the morning without at least one outburst of this description. Quarrels, and the desolate cries of street hawkers, and the shouts of children chasing orange-peel over cobbles, and at night loud singing and the sour reek of the refuse-carts, made up the atmosphere of the street."

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